From devastating wildfires and landslides to droughts and extreme heat waves, climate-related events disrupt the lives of communities around the world. How these events impact the health of Los Angeles’s vulnerable communities is a question numerous USC researchers are working to solve. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $4.1 million to a USC-led initiative to build a community of transdisciplinary scientists and a robust infrastructure with the goal of advancing solution-oriented climate change adaptation and health research.
The center is called CLIMA, short for the CLIMAte-related Exposures, Adaptation and Health Equity Center. CLIMA brings together researchers from the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, USC Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, USC Viterbi School of Engineering and USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
This NIH award is a milestone in USC President Carol Folt’s Sustainability “moonshot,” an ambitious university-wide commitment to innovation in the space of sustainability through research and education.